Industry News
Jun 1, 2009Utah CEO Spotlight on Dinesh Patel
Founding Partner and Managing Director, vSpring Capital
As the soft-spoken father of Utah’s biotechnology industry, Dinesh Patel has proven that great ideas don’t have to go to the Silicon Valley to be commercially successful.
“We have a very dynamic ecosystem for creating high-tech companies in Utah,” Patel says, thanks to an entrepreneurial mindset cultivated through initiatives like the Utah Science Technology and Research (USTAR) initiative, which he chairs.
Patel recently received the lifetime achievement honor at the inaugural Utah Genius Awards event. He holds 15 patents, has been an active angel investor in at least two dozen biotechnology enterprises and is founding partner and managing director of vSpring Capital, a venture entrepreneurship firm.
He crafted his role as mentor with a patient, wise hand, starting in 1985 with TheraTech, Utah’s first biotechnology company. “We hardly had any cash and there was no venture capital to tap into at the time,” Patel recalls. The company went public in 1992 and flourished, its value topping $350 million when Watson Pharmaceuticals acquired it in 1999. Patel then founded Salus Therapeutics and sold it to Genta for about $30 million.
Patel is most proud of TheraTech as an incubator for many employees who went on to start their own biotech companies. When Patel was inducted into the Utah Technology Council’s hall of fame in 2006, it was UTC President and CEO Richard Nelson who conferred the title of “father of biotechnology and pharmaceuticals in the Mountain West region” upon him.
“Utah has become a leader in the field of genetics — where more disease-causing genes have been identified than anywhere else in the world,” Patel explains. “Now, in the next generation, the state has the potential to be a world leader in the field of personalized medicine and molecular diagnostics.”
At vSpring, for example, Patel has led investment efforts in two molecular diagnostics startups: Axiol Biotech, which is developing a diagnostic test for scoliosis, and LineaGen Research Corp., which conducts autism research.
Patel believes the next generation of Utah researchers will be even more successful. In late April, he helped to break ground for USTAR’s 200,000-square-foot green-certified, energy-efficient research facility on the University of Utah campus that will support technology clusters ranging from nanomaterials, nanomedicine and drug delivery to genetics, bioimage analysis and the neurobiology of developmental disorders.
by Les Roka
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